There is no shortage of advice regarding your fitness and health. Different diets, workout programs, and training plans exist to achieve specific goals. However, you may want to structure your workouts, track your progress, and go at your own pace. If this sounds like you, you may want to consider using the FITT Principle.
What Is The FITT Principle?
The FITT Principle is an easy-to-follow, straightforward guideline for revising and improving your workouts. It consists of four elements that help you tweak your routine to keep you moving toward your fitness goals. FITT is an acronym that helps you easily remember the levers you can adjust to avoid plateauing and continuously challenge yourself. Let’s look at the four elements of FITT.
Frequency
Frequency represents how often you exercise. It can depend on several factors, such as your goals, fitness level, and the types of workouts you do. While consistency is critical to establishing an exercise habit, it’s vital to have a regular schedule that allows for recovery time between workouts.
Intensity
Intensity measures how hard your body is working while exercising. There are many ways to measure intensity. If you have a fitness tracker, you can monitor your heart rate. Otherwise, you can use the Rate of Perceived Exertion Scale (RPE) to track how hard you’re exercising.
Time
Time measures how long your exercise sessions are. This can vary widely depending on your activities and fitness level. However, the time you spend exercising should align with your fitness goals. For example, building endurance, increasing your strength, or simply improving your overall health requires different activities and time commitments.
Type
Type refers to the kinds of training in your routine, such as cardio, strength, and flexibility. Regardless of what you do, it’s vital to experiment and find exercises you enjoy. Otherwise, you’ll try to push through and rely on motivation and willpower to achieve your goals, such as increasing muscle mass or losing weight. Unfortunately, willpower and motivation are finite, and you’ll eventually stop exercising. When you enjoy what you’re doing, you will increase your chances of sticking with your workout routine.
How To Use FITT?
You can probably see how FITT can help you continuously improve, whether you are new to exercise or starting over. No matter your fitness level, you are starting somewhere. Getting into a repetitive routine may lead to burnout, an overuse injury, or plateauing in progress.
Let’s say you’ve been walking three times a week for 20 minutes, slightly faster than your walking pace. However, your body will adapt to this routine after a few weeks. As a result, the workouts will feel easier, so you burn fewer calories and feel like you are not improving. This is where FITT can help you by making a change to your routine:
- Change frequency by adding another day of walking
- Change intensity by walking faster, start running, walking on an inclined treadmill, or hilly route
- Change time by walking longer every time you go for a walk
- Change the type of exercise you’re doing by swapping one or more walks with another activity, such as hiking, cycling, or running
Adjusting one of these FITT elements can dramatically change your workout and how your body responds. By making changes when your workouts seem easy, you can break through the plateau and continue to make progress toward your goals.
Tracking Your Progress
Tracking your progress can help you identify when you’ve stopped progressing by giving you a complete picture of your effort. Not only will you see your progress, but you may also see early indicators of trouble, which will let you apply the FITT Principle sooner rather than later.
Tracking your progress doesn’t take much effort, but recording the data is an extra step. However, you can improve your consistency by using an app, smart scale, and fitness tracker to gather that data automatically whenever you exercise or weigh yourself.
How FITT Can Help Prevent Injuries
It is essential to keep making changes and pushing yourself harder. However, don’t change too much at once. One of the benefits of FITT is that it puts you in the mindset of monitoring your frequency, intensity, time exercising, and activities.
When you mindlessly exercise doing the same activity or do not get enough rest between intense workouts, you increase your risk of an injury. However, FITT encourages you to add variety to your workouts, breaking up repetitive movements with different activities and building in rest days.
The Takeaway
FITT lets you personalize an exercise plan that aligns with your fitness goals, helps you continuously make progress, and keeps your workouts engaging. The FITT Principle can help you break through plateaus. Tracking your progress can help you identify when you’ve stopped progressing. Therefore, you can make adjustments when you’re seeing signs of trouble.
FitTrend’s mission is to help you along your self-improvement journey, promote an active lifestyle, and help you achieve your goals. Our journal can help you track your activities and workouts. Also, FitTrend allows you to connect certain smartwatches and trackers to your account to make it easier for you to update your journal automatically. Create your account today and start using FitTrend for free!
Disclaimer: No content on this site should ever be used as a substitute for direct medical advice from your doctor or other qualified clinician.
